I

Mrs. Slater moved, a black silhouette, across the yellow glow of the kerosene-lamp, bearing in chubby hands the last of the supper dishes. She kicked the kitchen door open with a grunt and disappeared. It was silent in the room. Walden Slater, having removed his boots with the elastic sides, drifted almost surreptitiously to the back porch, his gray woollen socks touching the floor soundlessly. Reaching his haven he sank with a hoarse sigh of relief into the broken rocker. Dreeme could see his bent form against the misty light of evening whenever the door to the kitchen flapped open. He sat there and rocked to the faint creak-creak of the chair; his talon-like hands grasping the arms of the rocker. He was a personification of a certain aspect of this New England. He was the tired man reeking with dried sweat, earth, and barn-yard odors sitting in the quiet evening and drawing in hoarse and throbbing lung-fulls of fresh air. His bones were tired. His flesh crawled sluggishly with an old weariness. The hinges of his knees were stiff. He was a finality in himself, a period put to a long sentence of history. The kitchen door swung to and fro and Dreeme ceased to look at the farmer. He looked out of the window instead, into the dark side-yard where the Slater children sat huddled together on a broken barrow and talked soberly in low tones. Their voices sounded thin and far away, pinched sounds, words rolled between huge fists. The low light of the evening fell across the sides of their faces. Small impish profiles turned to the brooding night. A dark form passed between Dreeme’s eyes and the children’s faces and the young doctor saw the figure of the reverend George Burroughs, skinny hands clasped behind the frayed skirts of his musty coat, stalk off into the darkness. It was like a brief eclipse, an instant’s impenetrable blackness, and then it was gone. Light footsteps died almost instantaneously in the direction of the Leeminster Road.

Dreeme looked back into the room ... well ... he progressed slowly toward the kitchen door.

“Where is your niece?” he asked Mrs. Slater with a directness that was unusual in Marlborough where people talked by inference. The woman’s eyes fluttered wildly at this unexpected question.

“Deborah ... well, Deborah....” She hurried toward the kitchen door with a massed pillar of plates, a sort of leaning tower of Pisa that threatened to dissolve into fragments at every step. At the door she turned. She said:

“Helping out.... They needed somebody to help out....”

Her voice drifted back through the door.

“Mrs. Westcott ... sent for her....”

Dreeme brooded upon this for an instant, fumbled in his pocket for his pipe, and then sauntered slowly toward the kitchen. Mrs. Slater, at the sink, her sleeves rolled back over her short plump arms, observed him with a suspicious concern, her head cocked on one side, an eye turned back. It was like the eye of a querulous parrot. Dreeme leaned against the wall, and, watching her, filled his pipe.

“Has Mrs. Westcott been here?” he asked.

Mrs. Slater turned to her dishes. She said:

“Oh, no!”

It was inconceivable, of course.

Dreeme waited for a moment as he lighted his pipe.

“Who has?” he inquired.

Mrs. Slater looked reproachfully at him as she fumbled for certain words in her throat.

“We thought we’d have Deborah with us ... especially since....” A clashing of dishes drowned a few words. “But the preacher said ... he saw Mrs. Westcott....”

“You mean Burroughs had your niece sent over to the Westcott farm as hired girl?” broke in Dreeme.

Mrs. Slater did not like the word.

“She’s going to help out ... until Mr. Westcott is better....”

She actually glowered at Dreeme.

“In that lonely hole,” thought Dreeme aloud.

“It’s hard enough to live ...” began Mrs. Slater.

“It is,” said the doctor strongly.

Well, it was none of his business. The poor relation. Go where you are sent. All the same ... it was a shame. Cloven head and his malignant eyes. Eyes like wet violets. “Rock of Ages.” Now why had he thought of that? He opened his mouth to speak again to Mrs. Slater, thought better of it, and turned back into the lamp-lit room. He had wanted to talk to the girl, to find out what she thought of things and how this valley had affected her young mind. But now.... Why she might as well be in Timbuktoo. The Westcott farm-gate opened into.... “All hope abandon....” He picked up his hat from the little side table and walked slowly through the hall and into the yard. The hushed voices of the Slater children sounded like a faint drone. He could hear the rocker on the back porch. Creak-creak. The dew was heavy. It was better to keep to the gravel path. Creak-creak. He reached the street and turned toward his own house. Creak-creak. Shine, moon. He looked up at a murky sky. No moon. It was too early for the moon. Creak. “Stars of the summer night.” Longfellow. “Far in yon azure....” Creak. He fumbled (creak) at the knob to his door, pushed it open, and entered the small hall. To go upstairs. Bed. But he was not sleepy. He would go into the back study and read for a while. Or mull over Humphrey Lathrop’s conversation. Humphrey knew.... He felt his way along the dark hall and pushed the door open into the study. The minute he entered the room he knew that there was somebody there. He was not frightened. He leaned back against the door and said softly: “Who is it?”

A throat cleared noisily.

“Wagner,” replied a hoarse voice.

“Are you by the table? There is a lamp there. Light it,” said Dreeme.

The match spurted like a tiny firework and great shadows sprang up on all sides. A dancing ring of Jinns. Wagner’s red beard hung like a sultry smoke above the chimney. The man lowered his head and peered at Dreeme across the table.

“What is it, Wagner?” inquired the doctor. “Is Westcott’s leg bad?”

The shaggy head shook slowly.

“That’s all right,” he replied. “I wash it now. I’m real good at it.”

His eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and his yellow teeth glowed through the mass of hair.

“She said you was to meet her by ten in the back room of the burned mill,” he said slowly in his rusty sepulchral voice. “She told me to tell you.”

A faint throb of anticipation tugged at the doctor’s mind.

“Deborah?” he asked. Wagner said:

“Missus Westcott.”

Dreeme’s mind stopped dead. Automatically he said:

“Tell her I won’t come.”

“She said she guessed you would all right,” replied the hoarse voice.

To think now. Leaning over the well. The white nape of her neck. Heavy boots dragged across the floor.

“What does she want?” he asked softly. There was no response. Boots dragging. A puffing. Dreeme floundered in a sea of amazement. He repeated his question loudly.

“What does she want, I say?”

This silence! Collecting his wits, he peered about the dimly lighted study. Empty, of course. He had gone out. Gone right by him. Dreeme walked over to the table and sat down in the easy chair by it. A tiny white moth dipped and volplaned about the smoky chimney. Now what was this? He would have to think about it. He leaned back in his chair and pulled at his cold pipe.

The faint ticking of the clock was like the tiny regular beating of a miniature tomtom. The minutes danced to it, shaking their small feet in an unending circle. They tripped by him, hands joined, and infinitesimal tapping heels maintaining a regular time that measured off the softly-flowing hours. He watched the vain moth dashing its white wings desperately against the smoky chimney. Sooner or later it would get scorched and flutter to the table, a charred and crumbling pinch of powder. Life was a curious thing. Breathed into a bit of dust it became a moth. Or a man. Something was happening to him now. His two years of dreary silence were breaking down and he was beginning to grow morbid about things in general. He was getting nervous, acutely aware of invisible tentacles that seemed to reach out of this darkness that encircled him on all sides and touch him softly. Humphrey Lathrop had said that it was nerves. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was a sixth sense slowly coming to birth inside him, a sense nourished by his loneliness that was reaching out into new dimensions. He was pursuing phantoms, hunting through the sun-shot fields about Marlborough for invisible essences that drifted deliberately and had a particular semblance of their own. He was going to solve an intense and formidable riddle. He was going to track down the secret of an atmosphere, the aura of a community. It sounded absurd enough but it was only the absurd things that mattered greatly after all if a man desired to be more than an eating, sleeping, laboring animal. To be a man, and all that that meant, was to walk arm in arm with phantoms, to discourse with shadowy substances, to resolve high mystical riddles. Ah! The moth shrivelled against the hot glass and dropped to the table. So that was that! He turned it over tenderly with a paper-knife and then pushed it to the floor.

Now then! He looked at the ticking clock from which the joined minutes were tripping their fantastic and regular dance. It was nine-thirty. Then it would be in half an hour. His thoughts, held tightly by the leash of his will, were set free and they sprang forward like a pack of ravenous hunting dogs. Up the Leeminster Road they sped and his spectral self followed them as an eager hunter follows his baying hounds. For an instant the face of Deborah flashed in the dark air and then it disappeared, left far behind by this rout of yelping coursers. He had said that he would not go. But she knew that he would, that his curiosity would carry him as far as the mill at least. What she wanted he did not know but he could suspect it. She was assuredly a lonely caged-in creature. She stood at windows and watched the night-sky and wondered about the life that went boiling so turbulently by on the great highroads to the west and the east of her locked doors. She sat in a room lined with books beside a cloven-headed man and a secret sat there with them and she had nobody to share that secret with her, no one, that is, except the man himself who was the secret. Perhaps she wanted to tell him things, to pour out the subterranean stream of her consciousness. He could imagine her muffled voice speaking in the darkness of the mill. It was not strange that she had sent for him, after all. It would have been stranger if she had maintained her silence. Dreeme rose slowly from his chair and blew the light out. Well....

II

She was seated in an embrasure formed where a portion of the brick wall had fallen away and dropped into the yellow-scummed water of the mill-pond. He could see the dark silhouette of her head as it turned sideways against the smoky light of the moon, and for a moment he paused in the doorway watching her, noting the regularity of her boldly-cut features and the cold sensuousness of her rounded lips. It was almost symbolic to find her so, no more than a silhouette, a face seen in a single aspect, a profile clean-cut and set against unsteady light that flowed with the rippling of milky waters. She was like this. She was the outline of a mystery, a part of that riddle that somehow he must solve if he was to have any peace of mind. It was dark and gloomy in the mill. Its fire-blackened walls retained the horror of an old debacle. Two men had been incinerated here. She said:

“I was sure you would come.”

She had not turned her head. She still sat sideways against the moon. But her hand moved. It was pale and indistinct as it shifted into the dim light. He advanced toward her slowly, his footsteps sounding hollowly on the cracked cement floor.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”

Her head turned and although her face was a blackness he could feel her eyes studying him, fondling his features with a glance that was both tired and expectant.

“I was tired,” she answered in a muffled voice.

That seemed to explain something and he continued his advance until he was beside her. She drew back slightly into her corner of the embrasure and he sat down on the cold crumbling bricks. He said:

“You mean ... of loneliness?”

Her shoulders quivered a trifle. She did not need to answer that. Her movement dislodged a fragment of brick and it dropped with a sharp plop into the mill-pond. Dreeme started nervously at the sound.

“Why were you spying on me through the stone wall today?” she asked suddenly, and then went on, not waiting for an answer. “I knew you would come. You mustn’t loiter about the house, though. It isn’t safe. He would be sure to find it out.”

Dreeme felt like a drowning man, and he made a valiant effort to save himself.

“I had business Leeminster way,” he replied in an uncertain tone. “I just happened that way. I wasn’t spying, I....”

“You needn’t lie,” she returned coolly. She put her hand on his knee. She said:

“You are the first young man I have talked to alone for years.”

The electric touch of her fingers filled Dreeme with a nervous excitement. He fumbled vaguely for words, but his mind was like a great empty sack. Explore as he might there was nothing there.

“He keeps me shut up,” she went on. “I have to ... but no matter.”

Dreeme still sought blindly for words. Her voice and her vaguely-outlined face were dead weights on his intelligence. He could not rise above them or push them aside.

“I like you,” she said. “Does that sound silly? Let it. I liked you the minute I saw you.”

“I think ... I mean ...” began Dreeme.

“You were like a boy with the weary lines of a man’s face impossibly stamped on you,” she remarked slowly. Her eyes studied him a moment. She asked softly:

“Are you afraid?”

His silence, complete and emphatic, was the mute answer to her question. In the milky light he could see that she was almost smiling.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said as though she were speaking to a child.

“I’m not afraid,” replied Dreeme with an effort. “What is there to be afraid of? I don’t understand. That’s all.”

Her face was level with his, and she looked at him for a moment steadily, her dark eyes under their heavy lids full of a vague surmise.

“How long have you been here?” she asked presently.

“Two years,” answered Dreeme much as though he were a school-child being examined.

“So long?” she murmured. “You see how ignorant I am. Men pass outside my window and I never see them.”

Dreeme, in spite of his confusion, doubted that.

“What do you know about me?” she proceeded. There was a faint breathlessness in the question.

“Practically nothing,” he said.

She sighed, and it seemed to Dreeme that she sighed in relief.

“We are not children, are we?” she asked irrelevantly.

Dreeme shook his head.

“It has been so long since I conversed with anyone that I have almost lost the use of words,” she said half to herself. “Yet words were once my favorite play-things. I would shape them into all sorts of patterns.”

She removed her hand from his knee for an instant and then put it back. It seemed to Dreeme as though there had been a brief flaw in the electric current that was pouring into him and which so unsteadied him.

“Be silent, then, and let me talk,” she went on. “I need to say things. I am tired of talking to myself and inanimate objects, tired of reading, tired of working, tired of listening to things that I do not much care about any more.”

She paused for a moment but Dreeme said nothing.

“You see,” she said. “I needed someone.” Her hand closed about his wrist softly. “I needed you. I had not been in the room more than a minute before I realized that you were that sensitive type about.... Do you remember looking at me? Weren’t you trying to say something to me, trying to say it without words?”

Her speech had suddenly become a husky caress. She leaned forward. She murmured in an almost inaudible voice:

“Say it now.”

Dreeme fumbled for words. Had he desired to convey any message to her? He could not find it in the welter of his mind.

“I was wondering,” he stuttered. “I mean, it seemed strange to find that room full of books, that curious man, and ... you.”

He was suddenly aware that he did not desire this relationship between them to establish itself too quickly and too firmly upon a basis of mystical understanding. It was too silly. Two strangers did not reveal themselves so nakedly to one another. He clutched eagerly at the tattered cloak of his New England reticence. She did not appear to understand that he was attempting to convey a polite snub, a discreet hint, as it were, to resume the formal disguises of casual acquaintances, but her hand slipped from his wrist. Dreeme almost breathed with relief.

“It is good to be away from that house and to be able to talk as I wish,” she proceeded. “It is an evil house. It is dominated by an evil man.”

Dreeme said nothing. He sat gazing at the mill-pond in a phlegmatic manner. Her dark eyes narrowed a trifle as she watched him.

“I, too, am evil,” she added.

Her tone was matter-of-fact, as though she were stating a thing already understood. At the same time, there was an implied challenge in it. Dreeme felt that he should say something.

“I don’t think you are evil,” he protested. There was but little conviction in his voice.

“All that is relative, though,” she went on in a voice almost indistinct. “Do you like to ponder over things, to intellectualize them? So do I. Evil is relative. Perhaps he is not evil according to his own lights. Sitting alone in the house I have evolved my own scheme of things.”

“What is it?” he asked suddenly. “What is it in that house? Why is he different from other men? What is it in Marlborough that ... what ...”

He waved his hand expressively, showing for the first time a curious liveliness.

A slow startled look suffused her face. She gazed at him steadily for a moment, and then the corners of her mouth quivered. Behind the cold mask of her face she seemed to smile.

“I will not tell you,” she answered, “At least, not now.”

There was an implicit promise in her voice. But no sooner had she conveyed this slight intimation of future explanations than she seemed to regret it.

“There is nothing,” she said. “It is the loneliness. It is the ingrowing. It is the days passing along and every day the same.”

“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.

She paused a moment. She said:

“All my life. I have never left this valley. I have never found the door that leads out into the world.”

She was a liar. Dreeme knew that at last. Her voice had again become a husky caress. It strove to reach out and embrace the dubious young doctor. He was conscious of a vague note of insincerity in it. Far back in his mind a sly intuition manifested itself, and it suggested that this woman was very near to acting, that she was cautiously feeling her way into his emotions. She wanted to find out if he could be swayed by passion, pity or intellect. He must be careful, terribly careful. He must avoid the almost overpowering magnetism that emanated from her white slumberous body.

“Life should proceed,” she said, her words sounding like slow calculating steps through the difficult labyrinth of her thoughts. “It should go on and touch different places and different people, accepting and rejecting, considering all. It should meet the passions and accept them all and live through them and with them. But my life is not like that. I am cut off, set apart from things, bounded by walls and the will of one man. My thoughts boil in me to no purpose. My mind revolves and it achieves no friction, no flashing of sparks. It is just an insane wheel whirling endlessly in a vacuum. That is what it really is. I cannot go on like that and remain sane.”

Dreeme did not know what to say. He knew that he was beginning to be frightened.

“I do not live in that house,” she went on. “I exist in it. I stare out of the window in summer and see parched fields stretching to eternity. In the winter it is all an expanse of untrodden snow. Sometimes voices come to me from the road. That is all. That is all, I tell you.”

Her voice rose, deep and husky. Louder than she had spoken before she declared:

“I was born to great acceptances.”

Dreeme was becoming more and more frightened. He did not want to hear these things, these somber intimacies of a household that was no part of his affair and yet he could not stop listening. Her words were a warm web that caught up all his thoughts. He could not stand up and say, “I’m sorry, but this is not my business.” It would be cowardice. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps that very thing, but she continued to speak as though to hold his wavering will in the balance.

“I don’t have to describe my life to you,” she said. “You know. You know because you know Marlborough, and the strength that exists in the walls of the houses of Marlborough. But there are things that you do not know. You do not know that my husband is ... but why should you know? He is like God, but I cannot tell you what I mean by that.”

She stopped, apparently expecting some exclamation, but Dreeme sat in silent bewilderment and said nothing.

“He directs destinies,” she went on. “He lets nothing stand between him and the objectives he has planned for himself. Not even me. Least of all, me. He has great power over the minds and futures of people when he chooses to exercise it. It is impossible to be independent with him. Once inside the walls of his house there is no individuality left to the visitor,—or rather the intruder, for no one enters his house except intruders. He spreads like a great force over everything. Freedom becomes a secret possession then, something to be cherished darkly at one’s bosom. It is only in an escape from that house that one may assert one’s unique unity. It is by slipping away that I keep myself sane. I have slipped away now. He is busy at his books, and the new girl moving about will, perhaps, seem to be me.”

“What books?” asked Dreeme abruptly. If he could find out what Westcott read he could find out what he thought. That was Westcott’s own idea. Even as he asked the question he realized that he was crudely diverting Martha Westcott from her self-revelation, and he flushed at his unconscious rudeness. She did not seem to notice his divagation. She said:

“I don’t know. He buys old books, sends to Europe constantly for items he finds in the catalogues that come to him, but I never look into them. My mind is my book. I think that he is formulating a new religion from them.”

He was aware of her untruthfulness again, of something held back and reformulated in the mind, of a desire to impress him and yet not to tell him anything substantial.

“A new religion?” he repeated with a shade of curiosity.

She dismissed it vaguely. She said:

“He is fashioning a new god in his own image.”

It sounded silly to Dreeme. He wanted to smile. A cloven-headed man on an avoided farm in a forgotten valley creating a new god. He felt like blurting out, “Oh, come now. That is a bit too thick.” Instead he declared:

“We all fashion God in our own image. It is our unfortunate weakness.”

She was getting impatient with this topic. She did not want to talk about anything but herself.

“But not his kind of a God,” she replied, a vague note of irritation in her tone. “Perhaps, after all, he is fashioning himself into the image of an old god. Would that be unusual? I really can’t tell you. I don’t know. I am only a part of the furniture in that house. I, too, have my philosophy of living.”

She paused for a question.

“Yes?” said Dreeme politely.

She stirred uneasily, and her knee, warm beneath her skirt, struck against his leg. In moving her head bent forward and the fragrance of her hair swept his face. Suddenly he was enveloped in the hot disturbing atmosphere of flesh. He wanted to rise to his feet now, to terminate this ineffectual interview, to explain to her that though she might upset his mental equilibrium by the magnetism of her body, the subtle insinuations of her mysterious eyes, and the leashed ardor so like a caged tigress that moved behind her pale flesh, he was yet aware of her cunning licentiousness that would use him for her own malicious ends. He could view her with a cold intensity from a distance now, could speculate as to her designs; yet, at the same time, he was aware that in her immediate presence she dominated him by a power that was not entirely beauty. It was this that made him uneasy and unsure of himself.

“Yes,” she said, low, husky, half-passionately. “I have my philosophy of living. It is to drink to the dregs the opportunities vouchsafed us by Time, to take advantage of that cruel gaoler, Destiny, and fool him at every turn. We are born free and we should live free. Our blood whispers messages to us and we should answer those low calls that ring in our ears if we are to vindicate ourselves to ourselves. Have you ever rested your head against a woman’s breast and heard the blood racing furiously through all its arteries? What are we put into the world for? We are the fruit of suppressed joy, are we not? It is the liberation of self for which we are ordained. There is only one way of being actually free, and that is to surmount the thousand and one petty laws and dogmas that hedge us about. We speak constantly of obligations, but what do we mean by them? Do we mean the suppression of our free instincts and the obliteration of our integrity before the selfish demands of another’s welfare and peace of mind? Is not that a slavish instinct? What is our debt to humanity but the reverse of humanity’s debt to us. There is a freedom based upon the destruction of all laws, political, religious and moral, a freedom where we may tread the earth as gods in a great tranquil equality, and it is to that freedom that I turn my face. If I am free in myself, if my thoughts and secret passions move as they please, why not this flesh which I carry travel in freedom also?”

He heard the soft sound of her breast struck sharply by her hand.

“I do not say ‘no’ to anything,” she went on. “I merely say ‘does it satisfy me and fill me for the moment?’ If it does it is good. If it does it is an end in itself. Let men and women think what they please and move about with free wills. I abolish slavery.”

It all sounded like a set speech to Dreeme, something she had written out and memorized, something that she had evolved to sap the spiritual integrity of whosoever she might meet in this mood of attack. Well, he would show her that he was adamant.

“You are an anarchist,” he said. He strove to say it lightly, to fashion it into a mere flippant rejoinder. To his chagrin he heard his own voice trembling.

“I am a woman,” she replied. “All women are anarchists at heart. The only laws they respect are the laws of their desires. I am an anarchist of the soul, of the mind, of the flesh. Nothing but the limitations of my body shall stand in my way. And through the limitations of my body I will find my own deliverance.”

She stopped at that as though expecting a sudden flood of answers on his part and her eyes were fastened upon his face. He said nothing but waited.

“I am lonely,” she murmured in a low, almost inaudible voice.

Dreeme, turning his face directly toward her, looked into her eyes. She was speaking through them, steadily, mercilessly. For a moment they stared at one another, and then Dreeme, his face flushing and his body shaking, stood up. In the moonlight so diffused and cloudy her eyes dilated like those of a tigress.

“Have I told you nothing?” she cried. “Have I said nothing to you?”

Her voice was loud and raucous, a terrible sound that caused Dreeme’s body to sway. It was as though she were lashing him with a whip.

“You have told me many things,” he answered in a trembling voice, “and most of them I did not want to hear.”

She stood up before him and put her hands upon his shoulders, the nails of her fingers pressing into his flesh.

“You coward!” she said. “You miserable coward!”

He took her hands from his shoulders, but still retained them in his own. Her hands were cold and the palms were moist.

“I am not a coward,” he answered in an uncertain voice.

She breathed deeply, a long shuddering inhalation, and then put her mouth close to his ear, her long body resting lightly against him.

“Listen!” she said in a husky whisper. “Are you as lonely as I....”

Suddenly she stopped and twisted about toward the door of the mill, a door that yawned on the road and framed in its square a clouded milky haze.

“Do you hear it?” she asked in a low monotone.

He had already concentrated his faculties and was listening intently.

“Yes, I do,” he answered. A cold fever settled on him as he replied, and he knew that he was perspiring icily at every pore.

Over the narrow wooden bridge that spanned the Saccarac River sounded slow footsteps. He could hear them distinctly in the nerve-wracking silence of the night, a measured advance that increased in sound as the invisible traveler neared the mill. One of the bridge-boards creaked beneath the weight of this unknown, and then there was a brief silence. The unseen wanderer had apparently paused, and Dreeme could imagine him leaning on the wood rail of the bridge and gazing into the black water that flowed so sluggishly beneath the cloudy sky. There were no stars reflected in that water. There was not even the reflection of the face of the noctambulist who was leaning over and gazing into nothingness. Even as the thought flashed through Dreeme’s mind he heard the tread resumed, this time to the accompanying crunch of gravel. Whoever it was had crossed the bridge and was following the path that skirted the ruined shell of the mill. Suddenly, with surprising strength, Martha Westcott thrust Dreeme away from the broken embrasure where they had sat in the murky glow of the half-drowned moon and against the charred side-wall of the mill. From that dark corner they could stare obliquely at the door. They stood there crushed against the wall, the acrid smell of burned timbers in their nostrils, while the crunching footsteps deliberately progressed toward them. The invisible wanderer was passing the angle of the mill now, following the blackened wall, just about to cross the milky square of the doorway. At this moment the sound ceased, stopping with a startling abruptness as though the hidden prowler had paused with one foot in the air. Dreeme could hear the woman beside him catch her breath in a tiny strangled sob. Both of them, flattened against the blackened beams, their shoulders touching, watched the dimly-glowing frame of the entrance with dilated eyes. In the silence that surged back about them like a dark wave, Dreeme could hear Martha Westcott’s heart beating. It was like a drum. It seemed to increase in volume until the whole interior was throbbing with the sound. Then slowly, ever so slowly, a dark shadow obscured the doorway, although there were no accompanying footsteps. The shadow hovered for an instant as though it were poised in the air, and then, to Dreeme’s horror, a low monotonous humming filled the wrecked room. The shadow, enlarged by the deceiving rays of the cloudy moon, appeared to sway, to diminish, to swell in rhythm with this unceasing drone. Dreeme, his nerves at the breaking point, started impulsively forward, but the tight clutch of Martha Westcott’s hand on his wrist caught him back. At this moment he recognized a melody in the low humming. “Rock of Ages.” Somebody was standing in the doorway of the mill and monotonously humming, “Rock of Ages.” Immediately Dreeme’s imagination shaped before him a shallow-faced figure in a frayed frock coat. A lean figure with dead eyes.

He had barely time to identify the man in the doorway before the humming ceased, and the shadow withdrew as noiselessly as it had appeared. There was the instant’s pause and Dreeme suddenly recollected that there was a patch of soft earth before the mill door. Of course. The loiterer was crossing that, returning to the gravel path again. Even as his mind began to function rationally once more he heard the crunching footsteps, this time decreasing in sound as the wanderer progressed along the road to Marlborough. They were slow, casual, a retarded crunch-crunch, a deliberate and unexcited dwindling. Presently there was silence. Dreeme, relaxed and almost smiling at the fever of fear into which he had been thrust by the nocturnal rambler, turned to Martha Westcott. He expected to find her relieved, but instead of this he could faintly decipher a concentrated expression of mingled fear and anger on her face.

“Well,” he said, “our unexpected caller has departed.”

“You knew him?” she asked.

They were both walking toward the door, tacitly admitting that the rendezvous was at an end.

“The worthy Burroughs?” said Dreeme lightly. “Of course. He was taking his usual evening promenade.”

She said nothing until they reached the milky square of obscured moonlight. Then she asked:

“Will you meet me here tomorrow night?”

“No,” said Dreeme.

She frowned at that.

“I have certain things I want to tell you,” she went on. “I need your advice about a number of matters.”

“Why don’t you come to my office?” he inquired.

“You know very well why,” she replied.

He said nothing but stood restlessly outside the door, anxious to leave her and unwilling to be too abrupt.

“Burroughs didn’t see us anyway,” he said inconsequentially. “It was too dark in that corner.”

She opened her eyes wide at that and regarded him with a mocking expression.

“It isn’t wise to meet in this clandestine way,” he insisted. “Somebody might see us, and you know how people gossip. I don’t like gossip when there isn’t any reason for it. It’s ... it’s too nerve-racking.”

He teetered on one foot and turned toward Marlborough. She was leaning easily against the door. She said:

“I will tell you a great many things tomorrow night.”

Dreeme made an impatient gesture, and started to walk away.

“He did see us,” remarked Martha Westcott, not so much to the young doctor, as to the night about them. “Of course he saw us.”

Dreeme did not turn about, but kept on his way down the road. The air was cool and frolicksome, and it ruffled the hair on his forehead. It was fresh and pleasant. It was not like the acrid smell of burned wood. Two men had been incinerated in the mill. That was a long time ago, and still the charred timbers stood there waiting for somebody to rebuild them. He wondered how late it was. There was not a single light in any of the houses. If he turned back now he would see Martha Westcott leaning against the door of the mill, her heavy-lidded eyes and archaic mouth turned toward him. He would not turn back though. The road twisted a trifle, and he knew that the mill was hidden, that if he looked back he would see nothing but the sprawling angle of a stone wall. An invisible weight seemed to fall from him. He had not realized he was so tired.